Out of our skins

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses ontologies of the digital model. The adoption of 3D imaging techniques into fine art practice redefines conventional typological distinctions, including image and object categories, and proposes new methods of composition and aggregation. How do the instrumental tools of technologised sensing inflect knowledge production? Archaeological imaging practices, in this case photogrammetry, have been brought into the apparatus of art practice producing technical objects with a distinct and contingent temporality that operates between the mnemonic and the affective. Such objects may be described as skeuomorphs, or container-forms. What might be produced and deduced from accidental outcomes of the 3D process and through provocative misapplications?

KEYWORDS:

• Photogrammetry
• digital imaging
• art and archaeology

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Martin Westwood and to Francis Summers for their incisive readings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Louisa Minkin is Course Leader in MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She is working with Ian Dawson, Winchester School of Art and Andrew Jones and Marta Diaz Guardamino from the Archaeology Department at the University of Southampton on the Making a Mark Project, the first holistic analysis of decorated artefacts from the British and Irish Neolithic. It includes the application of digital imaging and digital microscopy to compare the techniques used in making motifs across a range of Neolithic media.

Notes

1. Notably, The Astronauts 2014, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, video game, Playstation 4, The Astronauts, Poland.

2. Eyal Weizman's Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, makes extensive use of this technology to articulate notions of public truth and produce architectural evidence on behalf of Human Rights groups. http://www.forensic-architecture.org/

3. ‘The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed … it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. There is thus an ‘aesthetics' at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin's discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the ‘age of the masses’ … It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.’ (Rancière 2004, 12–13)